Running from the Facts: "If you want us to ignore the elephant in the room, stop yelling at it" edition

The best pro-doping stories are the ones that don't mention PEDs at all

Since this appears to be my third straight post aimed mainly at shredding the legitimacy of material pumped out by the corporate media or running-gear companies, I will reflect on some of my own critical tendencies, as these include a few shortcomings. Among these habits are reaching unnecessarily deep into the insult bag and expending so many words on a given story or actor—and this site does amass words at a startling rate whether they say much or not—that I can give the impression that whatever or whomever I demean is a categorical evil in need of immediate censure and diminution within, or expunging from, the running community. I know it’s a cliche, but this idea just reeks of mass projection.

There was nothing apocalyptically bad about this David Roche article. Had it come out ten years ago, I would have reacted with "WTF? This sounds pretty, but talks in circles and promises a lot of bang for a few scattered shell casings on the trail.” But I certainly wouldn't have expended 4,000 words on the piece. I might have said, “This promises a novel way to do threshold runs, but only seems halfway between theory and application, and this is more or less a summary of his working notes, cluttered with some friendly but unhelpful nonsense.”

In other (and far fewer) words, it looked undercooked and burnt to a crisp at the same time. So be it. No one wound up hospitalized, though it may have been close.

In 2022, stuff like that once would have struck me as merely unsatisfactory burns in my mind in the continual flame of the real trash being continually pumped out by Women's Running, Citius Mag and more than a few others. Roche is at least thinking about training and improving, is out there himself, and almost certainly doesn't encourage doping among his runners. That can only be so harmful even if it fails to meet my personal criteria for serving the public running interest.

Still, the basic concept of either just not clicking on links you expect to contain content you dislike or expecting nothing you see on the Internet to be eye-watering or in some way challenging is still kind of new to me, and will always be unwelcome—especially when coming from people who consider themselves liberals. The number of people who give other website operators hell every time they share any narrative-adversarial content, including pieces I write, continues to amaze me. Even when a website operator says, “This doesn’t mean I agree with all or any of the content” every time and obviously means it, if that webmaster has a high percentage of faux-progressive followers, a gaggle of them will step in and effectively claim a stake in the operation of the site, with some of them overtly threatening to not follow the link-sharer anymore if he links to “that guy.”

This blog would have probably triple the subscriber number it does if I stuck to writing about the technical aspects of the sport or pretended to follow popular but ridiculous cultural narratives when straying into other areas. And whatever that number would be, I could double it by engaging on social media in a strategic way. I know it sounds unlikely, but winning popularity contests has never been my thing because this invariably requires some checking of one’s intellect at the door of every online “party,” and while I have never actively sought to become a scourge, that’s just not me.

I put ideas out there about whatever I feel like writing about, knowing I might insult at least half of the people who cheer on most of my stuff. This is because I write about real events and developments, and do it as authentically as I can, and that involves setting up the stories I rip apart against a running-media background in which I participated for over twenty years and which simply no longer exists. If people dislike my bemoaning of the across-the-board erosion of ethical standards in the running business, they are welcome to reject this perspective and maintain the belief that lying and distorting facts are fine as long as there is some perceived noble aim buried within these machinations.

I’ve said this many times, but for both the new subscribers and those who are here just to squint and scowl, my campaign against the dishonesty of the running media started in mid-2020 with chronicling an effort within running to ruin the career of a charitable race director over a phantom instance of racism, a stunt started by Molly Mirhashem and Marti Fritz Huber at Outside Online and propagated by Chris Chavez at Citius Mag, Alison Wade (synonymous with Fast Women), and Runner’s World. At the time, I found it unbelievable that so many people with influence were not just willing but eager to gaslight someone who had done nothing wrong. But by the time God sent this mob a moral test months later in the form of a raft of polybigoted tweets from a high-profile American hammer thrower, it was already a foregone conclusion that its members would not only ignore it but in some cases treat this athlete as a hero, a voice for equality in a fraught time.

I am not going to link back to my past posts about this; these things are matters of record and you can hunt down the details if you like. But for people with this kind of orientation to what is and is not okay to say to rise up in thunderous indignation over a negative review of a David Roche running article really says everything anyone needs to know about why they are desperate to keep my articles out of circulation. It’s not because I’m a washed-up old man whose ideas are external to the sport and are rooted solely in personal angst. It’s because they know the opposite is true, and that even were I the hoary outsider or unhinged lout they pretend I am, it wouldn’t change the truth content of my posts. And the resistance notwithstanding, I seem to be that purportedly stopped clock that proves to be curiously accurate far more often than a couple times a day, owing to no special qualities other than the willingness to tick as it was originally programmed.

I mostly follow goings-on on the roads, the track, and scholastic cross-country. But the MUT community has been the apparent origin of about 90 percent of the mayhem I call Wokism within running, with Boulder alone probably accounting for 80 percent of that faction. And Wokism is not an abstraction, but a set of demented principles with consequences. One of those consequences is it being okay to call anyone who doesn’t agree with you regarding trans athletes a transphobe, many dozens of times over, and categorically refuse to entertain two-sided discussions on the matter. But it’s not okay to criticize David Roche even once. It’s okay to be or cheer on a sponsee of several prominent gear companies who is a racist psychotic fraud, or platform an activist who literally declares Whiteness to be the underlying problem of any problems within running, mainly the invented ones. But it’s not okay to criticize David Roche even once. It’s okay to propose an endless number of gender identities (including “blank”) and focus exquisitely on sexual behavior (that’s all LGBTQ+ reduces to) while reacting with fury over “body talk” of any kind that deviates from this script. But it’s not okay to criticize David Roche even once. It’s okay to pretend a bunch of other stuff I complain about but don’t have room to include, like systematically pretending doping never happens in your own back yard or that only male coaches are abusive or that Lindsay Crouse’s comeback fable was real or too many brazen double standards to count, is fine. But it’s not okay to criticize a David Roche article, or speak ill at all of anyone driving or riding the Wokish train, no matter the extraordinary scale and scope of their screw-ups and tunnel-vision lack of accountability.

Because it’s okay to lie in purposefully damaging ways but not okay to expose those lies for what they are, it only makes sense that this gaggle of pitiful cowards don’t want me, to borrow from their terminology and apply it accurately for once, to even exist. At least not with Internet access. It’s not clear to me whether they recognize how spineless they really are, because Wokism selects for people who have been spineless all their lives and wouldn’t know the difference between yammering via iPhone and moral conviction after a three-hour guided lesson. But they know they are wrong, and they are terrified of the whole sick but carefully guarded movement collapsing, because then what can they blame their personal problems on?

I realize I can be mean, but I’ll say once more that when this stuff started and I was on Twitter, I approached these people directly and, at first, as kindly as the situation demanded. I was ignored, as I expected. Then I was blocked, as I also expected, often by people I had never interacted with and whose names I don’t recognize. Erin Strout complained to the editor of Podium Runner, Jonathan Beverly, that I was being too much of a jerk on my blog, dropping my output for that now-dead outlet from about one article a month to zero. No problem. So I write only here, and rely on others to share my stuff if they want. Even those who agree with it in the main, however, are often loath to share it thanks to the demolition tactics of the Wokish.

But a few do—and even that is too much for these overgrown toddlers. They just yell and yell and yell and hope the few people out there like me aren’t enough to interfere materially with the whole inglorious process.

I guess I could have just written “If you don’t like something, just don’t click on it, or at least explain why you have a right to act as someone else’s censor.” But to the few Wokish interlopers brave enough to read this far, that kind of basic wisdom simply does not compute. They are more against speech they find contrary, no matter its truth content, than even the worst of the organized religious zealots I’ve encountered in my lifetime. Ideally, they’ll lose what little interest in running itself they possess in the first place and will be found five years from now as petty online thorns jabbing themselves into other people’s sides. More likely, most won’t give a rip about “social justice” once the reality of the cost of their kids’ orthodontic work and other adult concerns kick in.

But you’re not here for that, you’re interested in Women’s Running’s latest clickbait, “Age is Just a Number: Why Elite Women Over 35 are Crushing It.” The idea is not a new one. Perhaps Crouse’s “I Am 35 and Running Faster Than I Ever Thought Possible” from January 2020 can’t count as inspiration, since Crouse is not elite except at keeping a job in media despite nonstop lying, no detectable traces of originality, and delirious analytical ineptitude. But I covered this more recently, too, although from the perspective of not being dumbfounded by the impressive-but-now-mundane.

The take-home lessons are ... it’s not a big deal to run really fast after having kids; and it’s not a big deal—especially for women—to reach or maintain peak lifetime fitness in your late thirties.

37 is not old for a marathoner. Hall is running better than ever. Eliud Kipchoge officially turned 37 in November and is probably a couple years older than that. I would like to think this fact is, or is quickly becoming, common knowledge, but active efforts to combat it from “OH PUT ME OUT TO PASTURE ALREADY” media narcissists don’t help.

Nate of Orion Training Systems hit on most of the shortcomings of the piece here, but after listing roughly a dozen of them, he plumb conked out. Along the way, he was actually too gentle with the hammer. In noting how paltry Keira D’Amato’s training was before her 2:19:12 American record in the marathon, he characterized D’Amato’s training as “84 miles/week,” but that was actually D’Amato’s high-water mark of 2021. Between the Chicago Marathon and the Houston Marathon, she averaged closer to 75 miles a week. As Nate remarks, nothing like this has ever been done.

While there is perhaps no organically sane reason to approach covering running from the perspective of how shady it is while at the same time trying to popularize some combination of the sport and yourself, there is also no reason, other than being too close to elite athletes, for journalists to relegate its existence to being an existential threat in a distant hemisphere. But that reason is a compelling one, and it dictates the ethics of all corporate-paid running journalists as well as almost every independent outlet today. The show must go on, and as surely as that means trying to cancel irritants to the Wokish, it means framing American doping suspensions as unhappy accidents or outright laboratory conspiracies.

As a result, the distance-running media is focused on denying that doping exists, at least in the United States. Maybe some sprinters cheat, and maybe some Americans used to cheat, but Alberto is gone and Jerry is the moral savior of the top-level running enterprise in a drug-soaked sport. Or at least that’s what people tell themselves so that the gravy train isn’t derailed by discomfiting facts far up the track.

It’s one thing to write a profile about a single aging athlete, like this Women’s Running story from January about Sara Hall, while dancing around the main factor that has extended so many athletic careers and the number of historical doping positives involving Olympic-level athletes over 35, including Americans Mary Slaney and Regina Jacobs, along with lesser-known American stars such as Mary Akor and Eddy Hellebuyck. It’s getting close to the ridiculous edge when the piece centers on seven specific facts of longevity, but still, this is an article about doping. Asking for Hall’s opinion on this would have added color and surely some added page views, without threatening her in the least (one assumes). But I can see why Brian Metzler declined.

The more recent piece by Ali Nolan, however, lends itself to no such excuses. A skilled and complete article in this vein could easily have at least mentioned doping, since any taint from that would have been distributed among D’Amato, Hall, Sara Vaughn, and Constantina Tomescu. And Nolan, too, could have lobbed a clever throwaway at these three, like “How do you keep yourself sharp and ready to go when so many of your competitors overseas keep getting popped for PEDs?” At least get these women on the record.

What happened after the revelation of the Shelby Houlihan suspension last year was another in a series of unwelcome awakenings for me. I saw Jerry Schumacher and a few of his Bowerman Track Club henchfolk deliver an obvious whopper to the public, having chosen the most dutiful media supplicants to project it. I saw Houlihan’s teammates rally uniformly around her burrito story (whether this was voluntary or in effect compulsory is unknown and probably varied from team member to team member). But the collective unwillingness to admit that someone has screwed up and the club was moving on should have been catastrophic to the BTC’s reputation in a way the suspension itself couldn’t touch.

This of course didn’t happen. The burrito story, whoever thought it up, worked perfectly. Most of my longtime running friends who don’t follow the sport closely anymore and only caught the news on ESPN or in the Washington Post, on average no more or less credulous than the typical human, fully believed that Houlihan had been given an unfair ban.

The effect of this successful smokescreen during COVID-19 and the introduction of supershoes has been multiplicative. As an almost surely intended consequence of blitz of buncombe last June, the movers of the sport are now keenly aware, if they weren’t before, that no one in a position of power is going to contradict even the most absurd future lines of protest from someone caught with her hand in the pharmacological goodie-jar.

If you talk about the success of aging athletes and list a slate of factors with no mention of doping, then you are not merely avoiding the elephant in the room, you're the one who brought the big wrinkly bastard into the house and are expecting other residents to ignore the stench of rapidly accumulating pachyderm dung.

Since no guardrails exist in this area anymore, and the media has consciously assumed the job of convincing you of its baseline belief that no American distance runners are truly dirty, I will take a opposite approach and act as if I am being paid a million bucks to show why Sara Hall in particular may not be clean. I’m not, so this is all just a ridiculous “If she did it” scenario with zero probability of being true.

Click the "progression" tab on Hall’s World Athletics profile, and see how her middling track times (4:08, 8:52, 15:20) started levelling off 12 to 16 years ago. Her best outdoor 3,000 meters in 2006, when she was 23, was 8:56.03, still a personal best. Six years later, at 29, she ran 8:56.99.

Then in 2014 came the roads—a 32:14 at the Tufts 10K in 2014 and a 52:54 at the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler. These performances suggested that Hall was better made for the half-marathon and the marathon all along, but at age 31 didn’t signal that she was poised to move to a far higher performance level. In 2015, she debuted in the marathon with a 2:48:02 in Los Angeles, then ran 2:31:14 in Chicago that fall, closely in line with her other times to that point.

In 2018, probably sensing her time to make money in the sport was growing short, she started hitting the long distances, and often, running 2:26:20 in May in Ottawa after running three half-marathons earlier that year and then running a 1:09:27 half-marathon PR in July in Australia.

2019 initially brought nothing spectacular and was actually looking like an off-year until Hall ran an off-the-charts 2:22:16 in Berlin. A time that fast off a 14.1-mile best of 1:09:27 is quite something. Then, in 2020, she ran 1:08:58 in Houston in January. After the pandemic hit, and she surmounted the magical age-37 barrier, she ran a 1:08:18 half-marathon alone, then 2:22:01 and 2:20:32 in October and December.

Last year, Hall basically sucked, or reverted to 2018 form. Maybe age wasn’t just a number after all. But then came Hall’s 1:07:15 less than two months ago, basically a return to 2:20:32 form.

1:07:15 is back-to-back 31:52 10Ks and then some. 2:20:32 is over two and a half 10-milers in 53:36, and she didn't break 1:10 for a half until her fifth year of trying, in 2017.

You can credit some of this to whatever quasi-magical road shoe Asics has come up in response to Nike’s Vaporfly. But mostly, for reasons Nate reviews, you can credit supershoes mostly with being a Trojan horse for doping sprees, with an unexpected pandemic serving as the perfect fuel from the basic realities of high-level competitive endurance sports. Notice that the general line from pundits with favorite athletes—which is all of them now—goes from “The shoes don’t help that much” at baseline to “It’s not doping, it’s the shoes, plus the tunnel-vision focus enabled by covid!”

Uh-huh. The show must go on.

Hall seems earnest about her Christianity and does a lot of the good things Christians often talk about doing, as when she and her husband Ryan adopted the four kids they are raising. Since in this complete whackjob fantasy, Hall is doping, I'm betting she plans to use having raised those kids as a bargaining chip upon her putative meeting with her Creator, when she needs to justify her doping with something besides "Everyone else was doing it" (which, God only knows, God already knows).

Because Ryan—now swole as can be, and no natural mesomorph if he survived being 130 pounds at my height during his running career—is not even nominally constrained by anti-doping rules anymore, he clearly has some products stashed in that house that aid wonderfully in muscle recovery. To suggest that makes her automatically guilty of dipping into the stash is too much, sure. But to pretend the two of them have not at least talked about the underpinnings of Ryan's new “The Tick” look and what has fueled it is lame.

But there's more. Hall—both Halls—can deliver a speech to the LORD specifically about EPOpia.

There has yet to be a single high-profile Ethiopian doping suspension in athletics. Only one Ethiopian runner above the relative scrub level has ever been suspended.

Notice that I didn't say Ethiopian-born. Of the scant seven names on that Wikipedia list, the first four belong to Ethiopia-born athletes banned while competing for Turkey, Sweden, Turkey, and Spain. So, these don't even count other than to suggest that those three countries investigate their own runners more closely than Ethiopia does. And if more world-class Turkish Ethiopians are being caught than current Ethiopians, that is a strong signal of intentional silence and neglect.

The three Ethiopian nationals busted involved EPO (2:24:55 female marathoner busted at the Amsterdam Marathon in 2013), meldonium, a metabolic enhancer, favored by sexy female tennis players (2:04:52 guy caught in 2016) and morphine, of all things (2:08:56 guy popped in 2008). These cases are all part of relatively ancient running history now.

You're telling me that in a sports culture that finally even pops Kenyans, that none of those crazy-fast 10K and marathon types are on EPO? Which can be bought over the counter in Addis Ababa right near the track of the country’s national stadium?

This 2016 SI story about Negesse contains a link to a Chris Chavez article from the previous day stating that Ethiopia was investigating the doping test results of nine of its runners, five of them "top athletes." Negesse was presumably among the five top athletes. But the investigation must have fizzled out for some reason.

And even in this simple story, Chavez had to write something daft.

Abeba Aregawi, the 2013 world 1,500 meter champion, was born in Ethiopia and switched allegiances to Sweden in 2012.

That's a pretty unwoke way to put it. Aregawi became a naturalized citizen in 2012. Chavez makes it sound like choosing to vote for a new set of liars or joining a different gang.

Anyway, that’s one idea that I’m sure has zero basis in reality. I could come up with others for other athletes, but I suck at creative writing, so I think I’ll just go with the facts. Among those is that the show must go on, and it’s no accident that the people filling running-media jobs and supplying outlets with freelance submissions are exactly the kind of people who will bitch about the horrors of huge, influential corporations while having no idea of how ably the serve the machinery of those diabolical actors.

I will love the show in my own way, or at some point avert my eyes from it. And though I would never limit anyone from doing the same, I can certainly sound off if I think other observers have lost their way in the course of their spectatorship—especially when they become active participants in the show they’re only supposed to be describing as faithfully as they can.

[Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Sara Hall’s first marathon. Thanks to reader Scott Douglas for the correction.]

(Social share photo of Sara Vaughn—a qualifier for the 2017 World Championships in the 1,500 meters—winning the 2021 California International Marathon in her first attempt at the distance courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.)